The Stripper's Guide blog discusses the history of the American newspaper comic strip.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Obscurity of the Day(s): Marvelous Mike

'Tis a rare day at Stripper's Guide when we get to offer both the beginning and ending weeks of one of our obscurities, much less from beautiful syndicate proofs, but we're in the catbird seat today. Or rather, today and tomorrow since I'm going to stretch this out over two posts.

Today we have the initial two weeks of Marvelous Mike, which began on March 5 1956. The strip was one of five winners in a contest conducted by United Feature Syndicate. Bob Kuwahara's Marvelous Mike came in fourth. You can read more about the contest in this post.

Tomorrow we'll have the final rather bizarre week of the strip, along with Cole Johnson's comments on the series. All the scans, by the way, were provided by Cole, to whom much thanks!

Alan,Could you please hold off on the final weeks of Marvelous Mike? I've been faithfully posting a run of Mike from St. Louis Post-Dispatch microfilm for more than a year now, and I've almost come up to the final 6 weeks of the strip. I have had a few missing dates in my run, which I appealed to the readership to supply. Had I known that Cole had a syndicate proof run of the strip, I would never have set out to reprint them all. I can double up on the strips and reprint them all in the next three posts. I hope you can help. Thanks, Mark Kausler

Hi Mark -Sorry, I don't get out much and didn't realize you were running the strip on your blog. I've already got part 2 of this post queued and ready to go, but there's no reason not to put it off for a few days. How long do you need?

You're welcome to use my proof scans on your blog if you want to give your readers a treat for the final week and a half of the strip. Contact me privately.

My name is Allan Holtz. I am a comic strip historian, and author of "American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide." This blog is my outlet for all manner of interesting, oddball and rare material related to comic strip history. It is also a forum where others interested in comic strip history are encouraged to participate through the comments, or even by contributing articles.
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